(But Actually, It Is … )
By Joseph W. Smith III

“Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint, and your father will fall in a bucket of paint.”

I daresay most folks in my Boomer generation recall this jocular proscription — often used as a childhood taunt against some allegedly barbarian schoolmate. And indeed, for quite a while in the 20th century, gradeschool teachers and other misguided adults did indeed react to ain’t as though it would precipitate all kinds of personal misfortune — like moms keeling over, or dads dashing off for the household turpentine.

So … why did I use it in my latest “Weird Words”? As Webb’s resident vocab expert, shouldn’t I know and model proper English? Or to put it bluntly:

Ain’t I any smarter than that??

Well, the word “ain’t” can be found in most dictionaries. But then, these have generally abandoned their one-time goal of prescribing correct English, and are now largely content to simply describe common practice (which is why they usually include swear-words and other offensive terminology). Like the venerable Merriam-Webster, a good dictionary will generally tag ain’t as “informal,” “slang” or “colloquial” — though there is in fact one sense in which it’s perfectly grammatical.

Take these sentences: “You are smart, aren’t you?” “She is smart, isn’t she?” “That was smart, wasn’t it?”

Note that the short linking verb in the first part of each question (are, is, was) later gets repeated in the contraction: aren’t, isn’t, wasn’t.

So why do we say, “I am smart, aren’t I?”

That’s a different verb the second time around (are instead of am). If we styled it like the other sentences above, we’d get this: “I am smart, amn’t I?”

But that sounds ridiculous.

Which is partly because the mn sound is tough to pronounce; and you’d be surprised how much English spelling & usage are dictated by pronunciation.

(For example: We use an before vowel-sounds because it’s hard to say “a apple” or “a hour.” And we long ago started respelling the prefix in- so it’d be easier to pronounce words like impartial, illogical and irresistible.)

Thus, amn’t (“am not”) became ain’t for the sake of smooth speech; and it’s technically OK — which is why the graceful Grace Kelly gets to say it in Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window. (This occurs when James Stewart says a girl “just has to be” — or “be pretty”; to which his lovely costar responds, “Well, ain’t I?”)

After all, we wouldn’t want the future Princess Grace to use bad grammar!

But sadly, none of this justifies my own use of the contraction in “Weird Words” No. 129; there, I wrote (gasp), “it ain’t.”

So here’s how I see it: A writer’s job is to communicate, and the journalist’s job in particular is to be interesting and hold your attention. The word ain’t tends to do all this pretty well — especially if one reader passes out and another topples into a batch of off-white latex exterior (which, let’s face it, ain’t gonna happen very often).

And even Merriam-Webster admits that ain’t is “occasionally seen in journalistic prose” (phew!) — explaining at greater length: “Ain’t has historically been widely disapproved as nonstandard, despite its appearance in the writings of authors such as Herman Melville and Louisa May Alcott. Nevertheless, it is flourishing in informal American English with the meanings ‘am/are/is not’ and ‘have/has not.’”

The wonderful M-W likewise points out that in African-American English, it can stand for “did not” (as in, “He ain’t ride the bus today”) — and in several varieties of English, as “an intensive negative”: She ain’t never lost a race.

And Wikipedia, in its very long entry, pretty much sums up my own approach: “Linguists consider use of ain’t to be grammatical, as long as its users convey their intended meaning to their audience. In other words, a sentence such as ‘She ain’t got no sense’ is grammatical because it generally follows a native speaker’s word order, and because a native speaker would recognize its meaning.”

As far as hard-and-fast rules go, I’m tempted to quote the great Van Morrison, with his fetching 1967 song “He Ain’t Give You None.”

So don’t even get me started on split infinitives and using prepositions to end your sentence with.

I ain’t got space to deal with that here.